Experienced Users View Reddit Differently | Hacker News Reader

Experienced Users View Reddit Differently

gazehawk.com

85 pointsbkrausz34 comments

Using a rainbow spectrum for heatmaps is bad design. Blocks of color become visual categories rather than quantities.

The only good use for them I can think of is if the graph is on a log-scale and the changes in color represent orders of magnitude difference. For a simple heatmap though it'd be much better to just have a smooth gradient between two colors.

Sorry to nit, the article was interesting. That's just a peeve of mine.

Your comment reminded me of this excellent article from an IBM researcher:

"Why Should Engineers and Scientists Be Worried About Color?" http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/color/color.HTM

Some very excellent examples of how using a different set of colors in your heatmap has a huge impact on how it's perceived.

That is exactly the article that I learned about this from! I wanted to cite it, but I couldn't find it again. Thanks! :)

GazeHawk intern here. These are really good points. We're aware that heatmaps can be problematic and we think about tweaking the way we build them quite a bit. Maybe in a few blog posts time you'll notice that we're using a different-looking visualization. I've put that IBM study into our "food for thought" reading list.

You should, because I was wondering why experienced redditors seemed to be fixated on blank space according to this image: http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/redd...

...The two red hot-spots to the right and further down the page.

Is it an emergent distortion because of the heat map? Is it an aggregate spot between the link above and the link below that ends up being significant? Do experienced redditors rest their eyes on blank patches of the page??

It's the heatmap. The threshold between red and white in the heatmap appears to be more meaningful than it actually is.

Additionally, the veteran users scope out the source domain of each link as a quick indicator of the type of content, whereas the other users rely more heavily on the headline.

They also skip right over the sponsored link.

They can't even view the side ad.

of course the truly experienced user will have ad-block

More specifically the check if it's an imgur.com link

As they are images, always available, quickly loaded, imgur links kind of optimise the thrill/time factor

Well-put!

Also youtube videos.

For super-optimal Reddit viewing speed, use the HoverZoom Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nonjdcjchghhkdooln...

Then you don't even have to click the link to see cat pictures, you just hover and move on when it's not very funny.

The data in the article does seem to bear this out. The source domain is displayed at the end of each headline, which probably accounts for the shadowy spots on the right side of the veteran redditor heat map. You really only need to glance at the end of the title to see if it's an imgur link or not.

"...we can easily demonstrate that reading reddit is a skill that develops and changes over time..."

Actually, you've failed to demonstrate that. A better test would be to record first time visitors and then come back after they've become long time users and record again. That way, you could rule out the mitigating factor that you mentioned earlier in the article:

"...indicating that either only certain types of people become redditors, or that the veterans’ reading patterns had changed..."

As a veteran redditor (6 years now), I wouldn't even be looking at that frontpage without logging into my account where I'm unsubscribed from all the default subreddits.

Same here. The heatmap for the pro users should be all on the "sign in" box.

Veteran redditors barely paid any attention to the “welcome to reddit” header, whereas the new users stared at it for a long time

I'm really not impressed with this conclusion.

From other things deriving I would guess, that veteran users become more efficient, looking for what they really care about instead of letting their eyes and brain parse every letter. It's the same for me here on HN. I don't care about 90% of the content, even from the front page. So I don't even read it just scroll until my eyes find words they consider interesting. But I spend more time researching other sources to an interesting topic and actually spent some meaningful time writing meaningful comments (or at least try to).

edit I even end up more often these days using the browser search function to not need to read every entry.

The problem with heatmaps like this is that they don't actually give any information to what is the cause of the changed attention. Has the attention span become shorter, has the knowledge of where the better posts are and how to identify them become internal or is regular visitor to reddit simply not interested in too many stories because they know they come back in a few minutes?

Only with some causal correlation between user behaviour and your site you can change your site to adapt to your users. I really would like to see more research on this.

Wouldn't veteran users, in many cases, have already looked at the front page? They check the top 2-3 articles to see if anything is new and then can skim/see the thumbnail for any link below the top few. I feel like this would make a big impact as the first time I look at the frontpage in the morning I read it differently than later in the day.

I wonder why the concentration right at the bottom-right of the page (which contains site links and FAQ) is present for experienced users but absent for others.

Maybe that correlates to experienced users often quoting community rules to the newbies that are breaking them.

Community rules? The only rule quoted on reddit is rule 34 and it should be hardly a problem quoting it.

The reddiquette: http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette

Old timers tend to know it better than the new folks, mainly since it's hardly ever referenced anymore, but it's the guidelines for how to interact on the site.

I find it helpful to see the list of mods in a given subreddit. Also, that's where the "Submit Link" button shows up on all but the front page.

Personally, I look at it quite often while I'm waiting for RES¹ to load a new page of content. But I assume RES wasn't used in this test.

¹ Reddit Enhancement Suite (http://reddit.honestbleeps.com/)

Agreed... the RES 'loading next page' cog icon is directly above the 'reddit tools' footer in my setup, and I'm guessing it's above the 'help' for people with smaller monitors, and above the 'about us' for those with larger monitors.

I'm finding this fascinating.

Would you folks consider reviewing the assertions made by uxmovement.com sometime?

What assertions in particular did you have in mind?

He typically says X is faster than Y with a visual workflow. It'd be interesting to test that with GazeHawk.

How do they track where the users are looking?

GazeHawk is a YC startup that does eye tracking using webcams. More about it here: http://www.gazehawk.com/

Presumably they got a bunch of people who were willing to participate in the study, then showed them the same screenshot of Reddit and tracked their eyes using their technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com